Thursday 19 August 2010 02.00 EDT
First published on Thursday 19 August 2010 02.00 EDT

When Richard Dawkins's daughter was 10, he tells us in Faith Schools Menace? (More4), he wrote her a letter asking her to think for herself about how we know the things we do. "How do we know," he wrote, "that the stars that look like tiny pinpricks in the sky are really huge balls of fire, like the sun, and are very far away?" He wanted her to believe that something was true only if there was evidence for it, not because someone was telling her to believe it, and he signed off "your loving Daddy". Quite sweet: you don't really think of Dawkins as a loving daddy.

His daughter wrote back. "Hey Dad. Thanks for your interesting letter. You could always talk to me you know. I'm the one sitting at the other side of the table in the morning. Anyway, I've taken on board your stuff. I know you're well into evolution, but I'm not going to believe it just because you say it's true. Or because Darwin invented it a million years ago; old doesn't necessarily mean true either. I thought I'd make my own mind up, like you said. So I'm looking at the evidence; me on the one hand, and a chimpanzee on the other (big hairy) hand. And I'm thinking: cousins? Are you having a laugh? No way. And then I read this book, called the Qur'an, and that seemed to make a lot more sense. So I've decided to become a Muslim, ha ha ha. I'm the one in a hijab at the other side of the table. God is great. Lots of love."

Actually, guess what – no she didn't. But it would have been amusing if she had. Interesting that he communicates with his daughter by letter, though.

He does try hard to be nice with the children in the programme; he teaches them an old-fashioned playground game to show their propensity to learn and pass things on. And he hijacks an assembly, though they appear to be more interested in the camera than in the famous scientist off the telly.

It's not just God he's got it in for this time, but faith schools. Of course, he's right. Faith schools are a menace. It's a disgrace that the state pays for our children to be divided and indoctrinated with irrational belief. And the hypocrite parents who go to church so their kids can get into supposedly better schools should rot in hell, or whatever the evolutionary equivalent is (turn into lizards and slither back into the primordial slime?). His arguments are faultless, his thinking crystal clear; it's fascinating. Most interesting is that children display a natural bias towards some kind of religion, to read meaning into something when there is none, to look for stories. Or, put another way, there's evidence to show that we are programmed not to look at the evidence. Dawkins has got a battle on his hands, but hell, he's going to fight it.

Actually, he seems to be trying to keep the rage in check. Perhaps someone had a word: he seems less purple and apoplectic than he was on his last TV outing, less fundamental in his atheism, less likely to blow himself – and thousands of others – up in the name of Darwin. He even listens, and then decides he's right, obviously. Good value, on the telly. But you'd still get into God, if you were his daughter. Just to annoy him.

It's all very well being sure about how we got here if you're Richard Dawkins and you've got an enormous brain and were educated at Oundle school, which encourages questioning and science and everything. But for Wismond, a young man in the powerful documentary This World: Surviving Haiti (BBC2), it's a different story. The supermarket he worked in fell down in the earthquake; he was in the rubble for 11 days before being dug out. That's a long time to be buried in the dark, thinking about stuff, not knowing whether he was going to get out or not.

He got God big time down there. Well, the earthquake was obviously a punishment. And the fact that, when it hit, Wismond was in an aisle that contained cheese puffs and Coca-Cola (both of which he could access even after the building collapsed on him), was clearly a sign that his time wasn't up yet. As soon as Wismond got out, he was spreading the word. If God gives you Coke and cheese puffs, you pay him back.